Meet Lain. We hired him to teach nonprofits how to use MailChimp, and to help make using MailChimp a better experience for nonprofits. And as the former executive director of a local nonprofit, he knows what’s up. -Ben

Merge Tags can look scary to the uninitiated, but these little guys are the secret to any handsomely tailored nonprofit newsletter. They allow you to personalize emails to donors, volunteers, and fans of your organization. For instance, you might want to address donors by name or highlight different calls to action for different audiences. Merge tags make this flexibility possible.

You and I know that fundraising appeals are more successful the more personal they are. If you’d like to send out an appeal for your latest fundraising campaign, it might be helpful to address your donors by name.

All you have to do is stick the following merge tag where their name would normally appear:

(Make those vertical bars by typing shift and backslash at the same time.)

The merge tag — the part between *| and |* — will tell MailChimp to retrieve their first name and stick it right in your campaign, personalized for each email address. If you’re skeptical this will work (like I would be), just click “Popup Preview” within the campaign builder.

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We’ve been working on a cool new image editor in MailChimp, and so were digging through server logs to try to predict what its usage will be. While we had the hood open, we thought we’d grab (and share) some other interesting MailChimp stats:

• We have 1.2 million users in 158 countries. That’s quite a growth curve since going freemium in 2009 w/100k users.
• Those MailChimp users upload an average 472,000 images per day.
• We serve about 115 million of those images per day (using about 3.5TB of daily bandwidth)
• Currently, we run MailChimp on 117 servers. 134 total, counting all our different services and products.
• We send between 80-100 million emails per day (using 3.29TB of bandwidth per day)
• Our servers track an average 20,305,881 email opens per day.
• We track over 4 million clicks per day

Each week, Customer Love offers a quick snapshot of one of MailChimp’s awesome users.

Who: Baratunde Thurston 

What: A comedian and writer who loves politics and technology

Where: Brooklyn

Why we love him: Baratunde Thurston wears many hats. He co-founded a political blog, wrote a book, hosted a show on Discovery Science, currently serves as The Onion‘s Director of Digital, and lives on Twitter (where he says hilarious things on a regular basis). It’s kind of unbelievable, actually, how much he does. But expressing himself is clearly important to Thurston, and he’s found plenty of avenues for that so far. Here’s to loving what you do, even if that means doing a dozen different things.

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It’s no secret that mobile readership of email is skyrocketing. In May of 2011, Return Path released a study in which showed an 81% increase in mobile viewership over the prior 6-month period. Then, in September, Litmus released its own study which bore out many of the same conclusions.

Litmus’ number was a little higher: 150% over the previous 6 months. I don’t know what the margin of error is in either study, but even being conservative and splitting the difference between the two numbers nets you a healthy increase. Either way, these numbers show that people are overwhelmingly choosing to view email on their Androids, iPhones, and iPads, and that means finding a way to optimize email for smaller screens.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that media queries are a way to optimize email for mobile devices, and MailChimp v6.8 now supports them in the normal campaign workflow.

Now, chances are that if you do code your own templates, you already know what media queries are, you stopped reading at “MailChimp v6.8 now supports them in the normal campaign workflow,” and have moved on to implementing media queries into your templates. For the rest, what follows is an overview of what a media query looks like, how to implement it into your code, and even how to set it up so that you can adjust the media query style rules within MailChimp’s campaign editor.

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A few years ago MailChimp decided to take video seriously. Well, in the beginning, the videos themselves were never very serious, in fact, quite the opposite. But they have always served a very serious purpose, which is to help our customers learn how to use MailChimp, learn about new features and learn about our awesome customers.

But how do we know if these videos are doing their job? I get asked that a lot. Well, it’s all about the stats.

Graph of viewership, spiking the day we emailed the Wavelength video.

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